Sing'n in Binary: 42

Pressing her probe wires against the last contact in the PC and feeding a trickle of current, Jinx finds the repaired trace holding firm. Having just repaired a near-microscopic resistor that had partially burnt out, which had led to the bizarre fluctuations she’d been seeing

Sitting up straight with a groan, she takes the piece of repaired electronics and slots it into its designated slot before wrapping the tester in its probe wires and tossing it into a drawer.

She hadn’t forced herself to do this kind of finicky shit in years. The repair work is a true blast from the past, of her scraper days, repairing and reselling tech trash.

The former scrapper glares at the PC.

It reminded her of exactly how much she hates doing it.

In her younger years, she’d worked on systems that were even more fried than this one. Though this job is significantly easier as she actually has a work station and access to tools not made out of a scrap heap.

With that last check, all that’s left is to install a CPU socket, the accompanying hardware, and do some load tests to ensure nothing will catch fire when the system is powered on fully.

Standing up with a wobbling stretch, Jinx staggers her way to the kitchen and grabs a tube of meal substitute, ripping open the sausage shaped packaging and slurping down its yogurt-like contents. 

With a taste like chicken made of plastic, the meal substitute doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is, fuel. Even the packaging is plain, small blocky text where the brand name is only slightly bigger than the nutritional information and ingredients list right next to it.

As she mechanically consumes the nutrients, a ping to her biomon says she’s dehydrated, so the ‘food’ is shifted to her off hand as the other fills a glass with water.

Pausing for a moment, Jinx makes a beginner mistake and glances down at the brownish beige mash, before quickly stuffing the tube in her mouth again.

She can't afford to lose her appetite, this stuff isn't cheap.

With lunch acquired, the netrunner finds her attention drifting back to the slab of aluminum that’s haunted her for the past week and a half.

With time to calm down, she can now look back on her initial reaction with a calmer perspective and say it was almost entirely emotional. 

Not that the emotion is unfounded. But making her brain glitch out with how much she’d been panicking is just as unhelpful as blind trust. The same issue as assuming everything is an impossibly advanced AI plot to manipulate everyone to unseen ends.

Even if the behaviors are for an entirely different reason than they would be for a human, several of the choices the AI made could only come from something being genuine, rather than a convenient lie.

Eventually, even the most powerful AI has to run up against its limits, predicting the chaos of reality, and looking over the code shows definitive clues that at least some parts of the AI’s values match up to the Aria Jinx knows.

Walking over to the PC, her gaze lingers on the carefully repaired hole waiting for a CPU socket.

The most obvious unpredictable element is the damage to her code, namely how it was fragmented.

The plastic water cup warps a little as her grip tightens.

It’s not… awful as far as she can tell. But after looking over the systems, Jinx has gained a kind of sense of how the binary should flow and some sections break that pattern, like a zigzagging crack on a stained glass window.

The damage is relatively isolated, limited in scope, but she has no idea what the corrupted parts actually are, not to mention the absolute mess of collapsing patchwork the system’s custom OS had become.

She’s reasonably sure the system will boot far enough to trust what appears to be an incredibly advanced repair system: SRD-2.6.3. But Jinx has no idea if the AI program will boot, and if it doesn't, whether it’ll be able to repair itself.

She picks up the drive from the lockbox, turning it over in her hands.

But before her musing can continue, her neuralware chirps with an incoming call.

Sighing as she reads the UserID, Jinx puts the drive back in the box as she answers the call.

“What?”

Rayo answers with pleasant neutrality.

“I’ve secured the funding for your parts list. Expect delivery by courier by the end of the week.”

Jinx holds back a snort at the language.

Fucking corpos.

It’s almost enough to make her not feel bad for refusing to contribute to the fund.

“Is there any way I could convince you to hold off for another week?”

There’s a long beat of silence,

“Are you… incapable of the work?” He asks eventually.

This time, Jinx does choke out a half laugh.

“Incapable…” she mutters mockingly. “You know what I’m fucking talking about.”

When he’d first called, asking for a list of parts and expenses to get ‘his choom’ up and running again, Jinx had explained at length her stance on the topic.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to explain the situation simply enough for the suit to understand. The most she could extract from the man was a firm, ‘I understand, but Aria has every right to explain herself.’

Which misses her entire point of AI being too smart for–

Cutting herself off, Jinx takes a breath.

“The fixer I hired needs a few days to scrape the net.”

The corpo makes an affirmative hum.

“Perfect. You’ll get the parts, take a day or two to install and troubleshoot, and by the time you’re done your fixer will have more than enough time to find the asset.”

Jinx remains silent, if only because continuing to argue that point might have the suit decide she’s too much of a risk, or trying to delay getting the AI online.

Which she is.

She thinks.

But if he figures out her hesitation is causing problems, things might get even more tense. However, while Jinx is pretty sure she’d be able to handle whatever muscle this corpo middle manager and his joytoy choom will be able to throw together, she does have to sleep, and people can get lucky. 

Plus, if they get violent, things might get… lethal and, to be honest, Jinx does want to do these repairs as paradoxical as it is.

No matter how many times she sits down and feels a wave of existential dread, that little voice she’s had all her life, made only louder by getting fried, hasn't quieted. 

But she does know that waking up Aria only goes one way, so she has to be sure it’s the right thing to do.

Sighing, she glares lightly at Rayo’s avatar as he gives a small cough.

“We’re doing the handoff at a third location, I’m not letting whatever shady fuck you’ve hired know where I live.”

The suit gives a completely synthetic laugh.

“If you insist, but I can personally vouch for the man’s reliability.”

Jinx grunts.

“Twelve hour heads up. I choose the drop.” She bites out before terminating the call.

Staring at the wall for a second and waiting for lingering frustrations to fade, the netrunner eventually sighs as she throws out her empty meal supplement wrapper and plastic cup.

Picking up the hard drive again, Jinx considers locking it away and doing something else, but instead finds herself heading to her net chair.

With a solid timeline on when the parts arrive, there’s now a deadline.

Meaning if Jinx wants to figure out what makes her friend tic herself she’s got to start overclocking to get everything done in time.

Plugging herself in and slotting the drive into its slot, she eases back as she falls into the code once more.

Yesterday she’d discovered a variable that references from and is called on more than almost any variable in the parts of the AI Jinx is tentatively labeling as important to her core personality.

Sorting through every instance of that variable to see if she can work backwards to figure out what it is, she actually found yet another piece of evidence that not everything Aria said was a lie. 

Namely, a massive search file looking for someone, meaning the variable is describing a person. Though the near total lack of identifying features attached to the known data means she was likely lying about having actually known the person this search file is looking for.

Unless ‘%AN#&*’ is someone's handle, which Jinx finds unlikely. 

But that strangeness proves the search file’s authenticity, because just making up a name to attach to the search file would make it significantly less suspicious. 

And, call it a hunch, but a person having that much deep seated importance to an AI must mean they are either the programmer who made it or a part of the system’s foundational values and goals.

Meaning she’s getting close to finding those fundamental values.

Jinx triggers a burst of synthetic adrenaline and tricks her biomon into thinking she gave it five eddies for three hours of melatonin uptake inhibitors.

Sleep can wait.

---

A/N: Headache. Pretend I said something funny.

Ta-ta All.